Raptor: Call of the Shadows (DOS)

Raptor: Call of the Shadows really vamped up the scrolling shooter genre for the PC. Apogee had already published a decent shoot-em-up with Major Stryker (DOS), and Cygnus Studios probably had it in mind when they created Raptor since it smooths over a lot of that game's flaws. Not only are the graphics and sound top notch, but the overall game system is more exciting. Each wave introduces a couple new enemy ships and a new boss to keep the player interested. Also, rather than get upgrades throughout the waves, each enemy ship you destroy gives you money that you can use between waves to fix your plane and upgrade it with more powerful weapons and stronger shields. There are also several difficulty levels which allow any level of gamer to get through the 27 waves. Probably the thing you'll miss out on the most is the ability to play a two-player game with your friend.

Contents

Screenshots

The fast and furious opening chase sequence.

The title screen and main menu.

Signing up my new pilot.

The hangar.

Blasting away some enemy ships.

Taking out a bridge.

Music

Raptor's music was composed by Matt Murphy. Much of the music has a throbbing heavy metal sound, but the ambiance of the hangar and the mysteriousness of the night missions have a much smoother timbre. The recording was made using the General MIDI option. The current recording doesn't use the looping standards of the VGMPF and only has a single play-through.

Credits

Game Rip

The MUS files were ripped from File0000.GLB. The timing of the files has been manually altered to playback not at their native 70 Hz, but the more common 140 Hz to match the majority of MUS players.

The wave music loops in a special manner during game play. Instead of merely looping the entire song, a loop point is designated after the song's intro, and when the song is played all the way through, it loops back to the loop point rather than the beginning of the song. The loop point doesn't appear to be stored in the MUS file, so the recordings have not yet been looped properly.

There are three unused songs in the rip named boss1.mus, boss2.mus, and boss3.mus.